As the amount of economic and other data generated worldwide increases vastly, a challenge for future generations of econometricians will be to master efficient algorithms for inference in empirical models with large information sets. This Chapter provides a review of popular estimation...

A conference titled 'Forecasting in Rio' was held at the Graduate School of Economics of Getulio Vargas Foundation, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in July 2008 to focus on most recent developments in forecasting. One of the papers presented during the conference was titled, 'Predictability of Stock...

This paper analyses the international equity holdings of a large panel of UK pension funds. We find considerable evidence of market timing activity, as illustrated by the funds' decision to scale back their investments in the US stock market during the 1990s. To explain this we model portfolio...

The past few decades have seen amajor shift from centralized to decentralized investment management by pension fund sponsors, despite the increased coordination problems that this brings. Using a unique, proprietary dataset of pension sponsors and managers, we identify two secular...

In situations where a sequence of forecasts is observed, a common strategy is to examine “rationality” conditional on a given loss function. We examine this from a different perspective— supposing that we have a family of loss functions indexed by unknown shape parameters, then given the...

This paper considers the implications of the permanent/transitory decomposition of shocks for identification of structural models in the general case where the model might contain more than one permanent structural shock. It provides a simple and intuitive generalization of the influential work...

Se considera la estimacion y la inferencia de vectores autorregresivos en panel (VAP) con efectos fijos cuando la dimension temporal del panel es finita y la dimension de corte transversal es grande. Se propone un estimador de maxima verosimilitud (MV), basado en una funcion de verosimilitud...